Periods Of Hot And Cold Sweep World As Signs Of Times Include Swerve In Climate

 By Michael H. Brown

"When it is evening, you say, 'It will be fair weather, for the sky is red. And in the morning, 'There will be a storm today, for the sky is red and threatening.' Do you know how to discern the appearance of the sky, but cannot discern the signs of the times? [Matthew 16:2-4]

That was Jesus addressing the Pharisees. There are Pharisees in our own time. There are also signs -- related to the weather.

Has this not grown increasingly and dauntingly obvious?

For years, we have been speaking of a gyration or "swerve" in climate. This means that a sharp trend toward something like warming will intermingle or be followed by extremes in the other direction. Unusual warmth will be followed by unusual cold; unusual rain will follow a period of exceptional dryness.

What are we seeing in our own time?

The wildfires in the West have been followed by wetness -- intense storms -- while drought elsewhere has been followed by floods in Indonesia. There, at least 240,000 have been left homeless by rising waters -- which during the past decade have caused the temporary dislocation of millions in places like Bangladesh and India.

Will we see a time in the not-so-distant future when permanent inundation will lead to massive dislocations -- and hordes marauding from one area or even one nation to the next?

We get a little taste of "gyration" when we see the unusually warm November and December (folks in the Northeast were hardly wearing jackets) intermingled with the kind of cold shot that this week sent wind-chill temperatures to the range of 25 or even 35 below zero in the upper Midwest, and into the Northeast. Even Hawaii is cold!

It is why I have always called it a "swerve," "gyration," or "flux," as well as climate change.

We are in a time of extremes. There are the storms. Ice storms. Blizzards. In Florida, tornadoes ransacked a stretch from Lady Lake northeast of Orlando to New Smyrna south of Daytona along a corridor that we have mentioned as one of peculiar happenings -- roughly traversed by Interstate 4, the famous highway that connects Florida's east coast to the west (with Orlando in between).

"Famous" -- or infamous? It is a stretch of severe accidents (please keep this in your prayers), hurricane damage, wildfires, and also where there was a great concentration of Indians rituals and where now is Cassadaga -- home to many dozens of "spiritualists" who do psychic readings and hold seances.

There is at Cassaga a bench known as the "seat of Satan."

At any rate: the tornadoes roared by here (within less than ten miles), and are roaring in many parts of the world in different guise and not just meteorologically. There has been a sudden eruption of discord: people are at each other. A cold feeling descends. There is pride -- and when there is an epidemic of pride, there is the rise of the might of the enemy.

The winds in the weather reflect a spiritual atmosphere.

Do scientists understand what is happening?

In many ways, they were uncanny in predicting some of the effects of global warming. I spoke to many dozens of them about what was coming back in 1999 -- from the U.S. to Tokyo and many major countries.

But they have a picture that is incomplete. No doubt, cars and factories and refineries and countless combustion engines used for various and sundry purposes add to the load of carbon dioxide (which can act a bit like a greenhouse), but there are also disturbances in the sun and cosmic radiation forces of which we have minimal knowledge -- along with the spiritual factors.

No one can accurately predict a hurricane season and no one can accurately tell us what is going to happen to the climate over the course of this century.

There can be a sudden reversal to cooling just as we see a short-term chill right now and just as was seen in the Middle Ages (before bubonic plague).

While glaciers melt in much of the world, ice is suddenly forming anew in (of course) Iceland.

Up to the 1970s there were those who thought the planet was cooling off. Expect high rises and deep fluctuations in a time of turmoil. Right now, overall, it is warmth.

The atmosphere of earth is proportionately like the thin skin on an onion and so of course we can affect it -- and of course we should not. But there are also mysterious elements at work.

It is certainly time to address what we do to the environment, as it is also time to address the stark presence of evil that we send forth like smoke signals and that now skyward collect.

There are clouds. There is darkness. And from the darkness comes lightning that creates an orange tint and heralds the roar of a tornado -- not just past old burial mounds, not just past spiritualist mediums, but also past the region of amusements and race cars and lasciviousness.

2/6/07